The Northman review: Fear the reaper, when he is Skarsgård

Recently, a small ripple ran through social media when a series of posters for The Northman materialized in New York City subways with the title missing, a printing error that the internet reacted to with predictable glee. Some made quick work of Photoshop, slapping on winky stand-ins (Tarzan, Finding Nemo 3); others tried more sincerely to provide their own loglines ("Like Waterworld 2 or something. Post-apocalyptic, but it's tribal." "Vikings? Vikings who are going through a really tough time.")

The Northman (in theaters April 22) is in fact a tough time for Vikings, though it's arguable whether they ever had any other kind. It is also, beneath the arthouse sheen of A24 and the raft of prestige weirdos — Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe, Björk — on board, a fairly straightforward genre movie: A blood-soaked revenge saga somewhere between Clint Eastwood, Conan the Barbarian, and The Clan of the Cave Bear, with a heady glaze of metaphysical fantasy.

That it was made by writer-director Robert Eggers, who also helmed the 2015 Sundance fever dream The Witch and 2019's surreal sea-shanty chamber piece The Lighthouse, is less expected, though his imprint is all over the film — in its grand monologues and strange mythologies, the baroque, uncanny sense of world-building. What's less clear this time is whether any of it means anything, or is even really supposed to.

Alexander Skarsgård at least seems born to play Amleth, the deposed ninth-century warrior-prince whose betrayal as a child at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang) leaves him shorn of both his parents (Nicole Kidman and Ethan Hawke) and his North Atlantic kingdom. Conscripted into a roving band of mercenaries who storm villages, leaving scorch marks and pillage in their wake, his purpose hardens, "a freezing river of hate." And news that his usurper still lives — now an exile himself, somewhere in Iceland — offers the cosmic chance at retribution he's spent years preparing for. To reach Fjölnir, he'll need to draft himself onto a slave ship with other chattel of war, though he isn't the only one there with no plans to surrender; Taylor-Joy's ferocious, flaxen-haired concubine Olga has, she tells him serenely, her own powers of persuasion beyond the sword.

The Northman is by far Eggers' biggest film in both scope and budget, and it looks it: a sprawling summit-of-the-gods epic shot through with rich, hallucinatory set pieces, and movie stars in wild Pagan wiggery. Skarsgård, deltoids rippling, infers the damaged soul beneath his marauding slaughter-wolf, and a restless volcano lords over them all, burbling witness to the rivers of blood and ritual chaos below. In all that, the script, by Eggers and Icelandic screenwriter Sjón (Lamb), serves mostly as bare scaffolding for the film's ravishing vistas and flamboyant violence, neither profound nor particularly important. Beneath the runes and visions, it's a tale as old as Game of Thrones, and as simple as a story told around a campfire: a ride of the Valkyries spelled out in gore and popcorn. Grade: B

Related content:

• Björk joins Nicole Kidman in Robert Eggers' Viking movie The Northman
• Mad Max prequel Furiosa taps Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II
• Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe dance macabre in masterful drama The Lighthouse